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had the situation been reversed. In the summer of the previous year Jack found himself in the police station a few miles from the little bit of trouble for one of his the twenty-year -old son of British investor in Jack’s fictitious company. Thompson, along with ten other major investors from the city of London had no idea that the company didn’t really exist; all they knew was that their investment was guaranteed by the British government and that each year they were paid a very healthy dividend. In return the government got to cover the firm in a veil of authenticity and allow Jack to do what was asked of him without interference.
Thompson sent his son to South Africa to gain some real life business experience. The boy had played the role of spoilt rich brat once too often back in the UK and his father had enough of his antics. In South Africa he would learn what it was like to cope in the real world without his father’s money and influence waiting to bail him out when he slipped up. That was never truly going to be the case for young Mr Thompson as his father made certain there were enough people looking out for his only heir just in case he did revert back to his old ways. Jack was one such guardian; the ultimate guardian as it happened, and the man who Thompson senior would have access to should it all go terribly wrong for his son. Terribly wrong arrived three months after the boy landed in the country. On a night out with some friends Richard met a sixteen-year-old black girl. One thing led to another and before he could say, call my solicitor, Richard was in a cell charged with aggravated rape.
Had the girl been a child of one of the lost masses from one of the townships, Richard would have been sent on his way with a stern rebuke, if that, but that particular sixteen year old just happened to be the granddaughter of General Utta Embeke, the second in command in the South African army, and a former ANC hit man. The General wanted blood and it took the full force of the South African government just to stop him from entering the police station where Thompson was being held, and throttling him with his bare hands. Even with all of his contacts Jack was unable to get the boy freed and in the end a Special Forces rescue mission was sanctioned. The boy office building trying to sort out a employees. Richard Thompson was Michael Thompson, a legitimate was intercepted on his way to federal prison; two guards were killed in the rescue mission. He quietly turned up in London a few weeks later but the South African government did not ask any questions. The General was not quite so understanding. Jack was called in to meet with investigating officers six times and although they could not find any link between Jack and the rescue mission, there was always a suspicion. One detective in particular kept turning up at the office to ask more questions. Those meetings were acts of intimidation rather than a genuine attempt at finding out something new, and in the end Jack was forced to call on some of his government contacts to get the detective to back off.
His contact with the Police may have been minimal but they were significant enough for Jack to know where his nearest two police stations were in relation to his office, and as they continued to drive at relatively high speed through the city, Jack knew that both of those stations had now been passed, and by a long way. Before he started to kick on the windows in the back of the Land Rover in an effort to escape, Jack tried to come up with a logical explanation as to why the police officer had not taken him to one of the closest stations. Perhaps this case was so serious that the policeman had been Jack to police headquarters? would be working on the Perhaps the specialist
There were many good reasons why they had driven past the local stations; what was more difficult to reason away was why the officer had driven so far that they were leaving the city completely. Jack rarely ventured into the townships on the edge of the city, and as they drove past one of those huge centres of human misery he wondered which one of the innocuously named conurbations it was— that would at least give him some idea of which direction they were travelling in.
Jack struggled to remain calm as they silently headed off into the surrounding countryside. After half an hour Jack’s composure began to disintegrate as his eyes danced wildly in search of an escape. The driver noticed Jack’s discomfort and he relished in it. A dirty smirk spread across the policeman’s face.
“Relax man,” said the policeman. “We are almost there.”
Jack paused as he tried to give the impression that he wasn’t in the ordered to take detectives who
case were stationed somewhere else? least bit concerned by what was going on. “The boss would like a quick chat with you. I will have you back in the city in no time at all,” added the cop.
Jack looked at the man through the rear view mirror and he nodded his head yes to indicate that he was happy with the situation; nothing could be further from the truth. A short time later they pulled off the main highway and they drove down a dusty concrete, side road. Up ahead lay the shell of an abandoned industrial complex. Jack couldn’t put a name to the place but he was absolutely certain that he recognised it—though in truth, one old industrial complex looked pretty much like another.
“What is this place?” Jack asked, with genuine interest in the tone of his voice.
There was a brief moment of hesitation from the cop; almost as if he was deciding if he should tell his backseat passenger anything at all. “It’s the old SACHEM fertiliser plant,” explained the cop. “They have moved to a smaller, more modern unit twenty miles south of the cape.
This place has been earmarked for redevelopment. It is going to be a
power plant. It is supposed to provide power to the townships, but they will be doing well to keep the lights on in the real houses of the city.”
Jack suddenly recognised where they were. It was one of the proposed sites for the power plants that the company was going to build. He didn’t react to the new insight that he had, nor did he react to the undertone in what the cop had just said about the real homes in the city. By real homes the man clearly meant the houses that belonged to the white families and those which belonged to Blacks of high standing. This was just another way the old regime was trying to keep some control over the country that they very much still considered their own. Keep the new ruling Black elite in comfort and they would be easy to manipulate—the people living in the slums would be left to rot in the filth and disease that they had become accustomed to. It would be some years before they realised that a change of colour of skin in their political masters meant no change for them; even longer before they got organised enough to rise up and do something about it. Until that day arrived the country would amble on in much the same way
that it had done for generations.
As the Land Rover came to a stop Jack noticed the headlights from the vehicle move across the leading wall of the administration block of the building. It was only at that point when Jack realised just how dark it had become. Dusk had well and truly settled in and nighttime in that part of the world followed dusk at a very high speed.
The policeman turned and faced Jack once he had turned off the engine.
“This is how it is going to be,” explained the cop. “We are going to get out and then we are going to walk inside. Nice and calm. If you decide to run you will be shot. If you decide to fight with me you will be shot. And for the record; I do not carry a weapon. You will still be shot. Do you understand?”
“I think I have a reasonable grasp on my circumstances. Shall we?” Jack said, with his voice resonating contempt for the cop’s threats.
The cop got out of the vehicle and he went around to the side and opened the door for Jack. As Jack climbed out he looked down at the policeman’s belt. There was no gun. Jack scanned the derelict buildings quickly, but with care, as they walked towards them. Jack’s heart began to race. This was bad.
3
The End of Civilisation
The short trip to the abandoned fertiliser plant did not justify it in any way, but Jack had no option; he stopped walking to deal with a feigned cramp. The cop sighed as he immediately sensed that this was nothing more
than a delaying tactic on Jack’s part. Jack used the brief window of opportunity to get a better sense of his surroundings. Unarmed and unsure where a sniper might be hiding in the warren of high buildings which surrounded him, Jack decided that it was probably sensible not to push his luck too far. He began to walk again; a slow pace building quickly into a confident stride—if he wasn’t going to fight his way out of this situation then the only option left open to him was to try to bluff his way out.
Everything about the structures around him, which stretched towards the unpolluted night sky like a man made forest, spoke of menace. He wondered just how many before him had made the same ominous journey to that same location; never to return, with their bodies being left to the jackals in the eastern wastelands, or buried in a shallow grave beneath the hot desert sands.
The complex was made up from a series of differently sized buildings that covered an enormous range of sizes. There was a large nitration unit clad in stainless steel that towered above everything
else; the top of which caught the very last had already dipped below the horizon, out ground level. The unit would have made the perfect lookout spot for any potential sniper—at least that’s where Jack would have gone had he been tasked with that role. His only comfort at that particular consideration was the fact that he was still alive. If they had wanted him dead then the charade would have been ended much sooner. They would never willingly have brought him inside to do the deed as there were too many things that could have gone wrong—Jack could have made a run for it; he could have used some piece of industrial debris to mount a counter attack; bullets could bounce off any of the hard surfaces inside the complex, injuring one of the would-be assassins.
Jack’s highly trained brain then moved quickly on to the reason why he was being brought inside at all. His conclusions were anything but reassuring. The cop overtook Jack as they approached a small door leading into one of the smaller buildings. Jack figured that the building was some kind of administration unit, but as he followed the cop inside, he quickly realised that he was mistaken. A second door on the inside opened into a lab. All kinds of dated laboratory equipment sat undisturbed on dusty benches. Located so close to such crippling poverty, Jack wondered why this expensive looking equipment had not been looted the very day that the plant closed operations. His mind could reach only one conclusion—the plant was owned by someone who was not to be messed with. It was the fear that the poverty stricken, human waste, back in the townships respected so very much that they did not dare assault such an easy and obvious target, and it was that unidentified owner who now held Jack’s life in his hands.
The cop moved to the back of the room and Jack followed him. If the bullets did start to fly then he wanted to be as close to the cop as possible—turning the man from abductor to human shield would not cause Jack a second thought, if it came to that. The cop indicated with a nod of his head that Jack should take a seat. Jack promptly obeyed as he dusted off a lab stool before sitting down. As he sat down Jack noticed that there was a large plastic basin sitting on the bench. Beside the basin there were three large bottles filled with chemicals. Jack tried to look as unconcerned as he possibly could as he read the
49
of the sun’s rays, which of sight of all standing at labels on the bottles—after all, he had nothing to hide; nothing to feel guilty about; nothing to worry about. Nitric Acid, Sulfuric Acid and Toluene. Jack grimaced at the Americanism on the bottle of sulphuric acid. This really was a sign that European influence in the country was disappearing quickly.
A definite smirk spread across the lips of the cop as he watched Jack survey the chemicals. The apprehension and discomfort caused by the very presence of the chemicals was more important to the cop than any possible use that could be made of them in an effort to extract information from Jack.
“I always loved Chemistry at school,” Jack said, with a wry smile. The smile dropped from the cop’s face.
“Let us hope that you still love Chemistry once you have experienced this lesson. Hey Jack?” replied the cop.
Jack smiled and the cop stepped back a little.
Suddenly a door at the back of the room burst open and three large men entered the room, closely followed by a familiar and unexpected face. The face was scratched and sporting several small hospital plasters, but it was largely unscathed. Robert Theiler didn’t drop a step as he strode towards Jack; fussing with the lower buttons on the jacket of his suit as he approached. Robert pulled out a stool next to Jack, and without dusting it off, he sat down.
“It is good to see that you are alive, Robert,” said Jack, in a curious tone. He was not unhappy that Robert had made it through the blast, but that Robert had him kidnapped made overt joy seem somehow inappropriate, if not suspicious.
“Really Jack?” asked Robert, as the whites of his eyes bulged with silent anger. “You will forgive me it I ask you to convince me of that just a little more comprehensively. One minute we are having a nice chat in your office, then not five minutes after I leave you I am being thrown across a parking bay like a ragdoll. So you will forgive me if I ask for more than just your words of good wishes.”
There was an awkward pause as Robert waited for a reply.
“There is nothing I can say to you Robert. You are clearly very angry right now. If you take a few days to think this over you will seethat of all people in this country, I am the one person least likely to have been behind the bombing. After all, blowing up a building that I am still in would be a very unusual way to kill someone else.”
Robert slammed his fists into the table.
“That’s just what I thought you would say. But you know as well as me that the best place for an assassin to hide is in plain sight. That blast was never going to bring the building down. It is perfect—you get to play the victim and at the same time you get to walk away free, as my killer.”
“You know that isn’t true, Robert. You know that or I would be dead already,” Jack protested.
“No Jack! I don’t know that. This happened in your building and until I have a more credible suspect, you are my man.”
Jack sighed again.
“Then you had better get on with it,” Jack said. “I have no names to offer you and I have no intention of pretending otherwise.”
“We shall see!” snapped Robert. “Hold him.”
One of the bodyguards grabbed Jack by the shoulders and held on to him tightly. Jack made no effort to struggle.
Robert stood up and then he slid the chemicals and basin over to Jack.
“These are my favourite chemicals in the whole world, Jack,” Robert explained. “During the struggle we would use this place, and these chemicals, to build the bombs that would one day win our freedom. That freedom is due in no small part to these three fellows. Each one is very powerful on its own; mix them together and you have something truly wonderful. Tri-nitro toluene, or TNT, as the world has come to know it. One of the first high explosives, and in my humble opinion, still the best.”
There was another pause.
“Do you plan to blow me up?” asked Jack, with genuine concern.
Robert threw his head back and laughed.
“No Jack, I do not plan to blow you up. I simply wanted to give you a quick Chemistry lesson. I like to share.”
“Consider me well and truly taught,” Jack said.
“But here is the real lesson,” Robert continued. “In the early days, when we were perfecting the method, we encountered a few small problems. Acid burns and solvent
though we did lose a few workers.
poisoning. Nothing too serious, One case in particular left quite an impression on me. Before we knew to cool the two acids over ice when we mixed them with the toluene, things got a little out of hand. The mixture gave out so much heat that it boiled almost instantly. The poor guy making up the mixture literally had his skin burned off. But that was not the thing that struck me most. As he gasped for breath, with blood running down wha
t was left of his face like tears, he started rubbing his eyes. He rubbed them so hard that the mess of jelly was scooped right out of the sockets. You see, such was the irritation to his eyes caused by the solvent, and even though his hands were covered in burning, concentrated acid, he simply couldn’t stop rubbing. Instinct took over. He rubbed that acid into his eyes until they had gone, and there was no one in the room able to help him. Contamination you see.”
“That is a lovely story, but what has it got to do with me, Robert?” Jack asked.
“Ah, now we get to the good bit,” Robert continued, as he began pouring one of the acids into the basin, quickly followed by the other. Choking fumes began to rise up into the air. “We are going to hold you and pour the solvent into your eyes, and into your mouth, and down your throat. Then we are going to stand back and watch as you kill yourself in the most painful way possible, as you use this mixture of acids to get rid of the intense irritation caused by the solvent.”
“And why would I do something that stupid?” Jack asked. “Not even at gunpoint, old friend.”
“You will do something that stupid because you will not be able to stop yourself. Not even my rather large associates here would be able to stop you once the process begins,” Robert added.
“OK Robert, I have got the message. I genuinely have no idea who planted that bomb. I have lots of suspicions, ranging from the credible to the ludicrous. If you want to kill me then do it. You will not be any closer to getting the answers that you are obviously so determined to get. Give me a couple of days to try to find out everything I can
through my British government contacts and business contacts. If I haven’t got any answers for you by then you can take me back here for another little meeting and you can finish what you have started.”
Deadly States (Seaforth Files by Nicholas P Clark Book 2) Page 6